Janick Burn considers the body in terms of visibility and work issues. The notion of lived experience is at the heart of his performative and videographic practice. She is interested in the interstice that appears when two concepts or states are apprehended in a dynamic of opposition (passivity / activity, public / private, body / thought, etc.). This contingent place of meetings and confrontations offers the artist a framework of work and reflection within which to experiment the potentialities of the body - his or that of interpreters.
With Aubes, Burn presents an intimate and raw portrait of his encounter with time and light. Between the summer and winter solstices of 2017, the artist records in images and words the dawns she experiences daily through the window of her room. At the end of the night, she films the passage from darkness to clarity and translates her observations as well as her sensations. Burn develops a narrative of lived time, narrative intertwining expectation and activity, fullness and boredom, where are superimposed states of resistance and precariousness.
At the foundation of this work lies the hypothesis that the most sensitive way of approaching the body would be to not show it in the image. While Burn performs outside the frame of the image that she records, the work uses issues of visibility (or invisibility) in order to problematize the politics of representation. What is missing from the image is substantially defining it, the artist suggesting a presence that can be guessed by projection. Out of the field, his performing body is embodied through this "absence-presence" and through the notes that accompany the creation of the image, the fragmentary writing revealing a latent subjectivity in the videos.
Biographical Note
Born in Outaouais/Anishinabewaki, Janick Burn has been living in Montreal/Tio’tia:ké for several years. She is completing a master’s degree in visual and media arts and setting up a number of art projects. In her work, she takes a reflective approach that is concerned mainly with the body and the frame of performance and video, practices that inform her work and how it is deployed.
Publication
Maude Johnson
Janick Burn : Aubes
Longueuil : Plein sud, centre d’exposition en art actuel
2019, 6 pages
Thanks
The artist would like to thank Robert Séguin, the team at Plein sud and the jury members of the Plein sud Grant, Nicolas Ranellucci, Émylie Bernard, Maude Arès, Anne Bénichou, her master’s colleagues and professors, the J-R330 crew as well as all the people who helped her from near or far to make this exhibition project possible. She also thanks Maude Johnson for writing the text of the booklet.
